The only known portrait of Aaron Lopez, pastel on paper, artist unknown. American Jewish Historical Society, 1956.004.078.
Aaron (Duarte) Lopez (1732-1782) was a Newport merchant and during the imperial crisis became one of the wealthiest men in Newport. Born Duarte Lopez and raised in Lisbon to a family engaged in trade with Portugal’s South American colonies, Lopez and several of his siblings emigrated to British North America in the 1740s and early 1750s. Settling first in New York City, the Lopez family operated shops, owned manufacturers, and invested in trading voyages to Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. In 1752, Duarte and his family – which now included a wife and daughter – followed his brother Moses to Newport, where he flourished as a retailer and trader. Now going by Aaron, Lopez transported whale oil, sugar, and enslaved people across the Atlantic. He also owned several businesses on land, primarily refining whale oil and sugar into candles and rum that he sold in Newport’s marketplace. By the early 1770s, tax records indicate that Aaron Lopez had become Newport’s wealthiest resident.
When the Lopez family moved to Newport they openly embraced the Jewish faith, which was outlawed in Portugal. Duarte was circumcised and took on the Jewish name of Aaron, which he went by for the rest of his life. He joined a thriving Jewish community in the city consisting of around a dozen families, and in the early 1760s helped to fund the construction of a synagogue designed in the latest architectural style. The Lopez family belonged to a group known as conversos: Portuguese and Spanish Jews forced at swordpoint to convert to Catholicism in 1492. Many Iberian conversos continued to practice Judaism in secret for centuries, even under threat of torture and execution by the Spanish Inquisition. In the 17th and 18th centuries, hundreds of these families saw the Americas as a place where they could openly practice their religion, and some found welcome in the relatively tolerant British Empire. Although they could not become naturalized citizens of most colonies, Jewish residents of Newport, New York City, Charleston, South Carolina, and Jamaica – all of which contained sizeable Jewish communities – could practice their religion and do business in peace under the protection of Britain’s powerful military.
With connections in ports across the Atlantic, Aaron Lopez followed the imperial crisis closely but revealed few of his own opinions. As a merchant whose prosperity depended upon the protection of the Royal Navy, Lopez could not afford to alienate the crown, but he did not declare himself a Loyalist either. He sympathized with the Patriot cause, even if he could not act openly; in 1770, Lopez and several other Jewish merchants agreed to stop importing tea in deference to the Continental Association, a boycott movement spearheaded by the First Continental Congress.
Revolutionary War Privateers List, 1774-1783. Rhode Island State Archives.
The military mobilization put Lopez in an awkward position both as a Jew and as Newport’s most prominent merchant. As non-Christians, Jews could not be citizens of the colony of Rhode Island, and thus were barred from voting, holding offices, or serving in the militia. Most colonies similarly denied Jews citizenship, although in 1762 Aaron Lopez was able to successfully become a naturalized citizen of Massachusetts, suing for his rights on the basis of property he owned in the town of Swansea. Although he resided in Newport, his Massachusetts citizenship carried with it naturalization as a British subject, which gave Aaron privileges denied to most other Jews in the colonies. Those rights depended upon the survival of that Empire, which the Revolution put into doubt. At the same time, possession of those rights also made Lopez liable to feel the same violation of his rights as a British subject as his Patriot neighbors. Ultimately, Lopez came down on the side of the Patriots, likely hoping that the new regime would expand the rights granted to religious minorities.
Even if he supported the Patriot cause, war threatened to ruin Lopez’s businesses. The boycott had already cut into profits, and the outbreak of war led to a total cessation of most trade through Newport. As British warships moved to shut down all trade in rebellious New England, the Lopezes scrambled to save what they could of their mercantile empire. Hoping to prevent seizure of valuable cargoes already at sea, Aaron dispatched frantic letters to contacts in London, Jamaica, the Azores, and Madeira with instructions to divert vessels away from blockaded North American shores and into friendlier waters. In addition to the Royal Navy, American merchant ships faced attack by privateers – private vessels licensed to attack the shipping of the crown’s enemies and keep what they looted. Both the revolutionary government of Rhode Island and the Continental Congress also licensed privateers, and with loyalties in flux Lopez’s ships could find themselves under attack by either side. To safeguard his merchandise, Aaron instructed his captains to sail into neutral ports and sell their cargoes as quickly as possible, holding the proceeds for safekeeping with banking houses in Portugal and the Netherlands.
Even if some of his assets survived in this way, however, the rage militairé of the spring and summer of 1775 sapped Lopez’s businesses of employees and his ships of sailors, as thousands of young men enlisted in the revolutionary armies or went to sea on revolutionary privateering voyages. It might have been just as well, as by early summer he had little work for them. Without a steady supply of whale oil the Lopez candle workshops could not operate; without a supply of sugar Aaron’s distilleries lay idle; and without cargoes of candles, rum, and other exports – let alone a safe route past the navy and hostile privateers – his ships languished in port. Losing money by the day, Lopez could only hope that the war would be brief and that, whoever prevailed, business could resume as quickly as possible.
First Foreign Salute to the American Flag by Phillips Melville. Continental Brig ANDREW DORIA receives a salute from the Dutch fort at St. Eustatius, 16 November 1776. Lopez routed shipments through the neutral West Indies island of St Eustatius, where they were transferred to smaller ships to run the British blockade of North America. Naval History and Heritage Command
If the outbreak of war had put Aaron Lopez’s business on the precipice by the summer of 1775, the blockade of the fall and winter pushed it into near ruin. At the start of the year Lopez owned more than thirty trading ships, ran profitable candle-making and distilling operations, and interests in cargos and mercantile houses worth thousands of pounds sterling. After six months of blockade, all of these assets were either worthless or inaccessible. Adding to his financial burden, as a leading citizen Lopez was expected to come to the aid of hundreds of his employees, clients, and less fortunate members of the Jewish community. Even if they retained some assets overseas, by the end of the year, the Lopez family was near bankruptcy.
Lopez had made preparations for the worst, however. Hoping to prevent the seizure of his goods, Aaron cultivated relationships with British officials such as Charles Dudley and Commodore James Wallace, and had even dined aboard HMS Rose before the blockade. Even as he cultivated British support, however, Lopez had also subtly shifted his business practices in case the revolutionaries took power, moving his primary port of re-supply in the Caribbean from English Jamaica to the neutral Dutch island of St. Eustatius, which also supplied many of the weapons and much of the gunpowder used by the revolutionaries throughout the War for Independence. After living through the threat of bombardment, Lopez moved his family to property he had bought as a refuge in Taunton, Massachusetts.
Touro Synagogue, circa 1890-1900. Newport Historical Society, P2763.
Aaron Lopez’s decision to side with the Patriots put him at odds with many members of Newport’s Jewish community, who became Loyalists either out of attachment to the religious freedom granted them by the British Empire or the hope of continued prosperity within the Empire. One of these was the community’s prayer leader, Isaac Touro, whose Loyalism became so repulsive to the revolutionaries that he was forced to flee Newport in 1779 under the protection of the British army. Although Touro had safeguarded the community’s synagogue during the occupation, Patriot Jews turned their back on their former teacher, and he never returned to Newport or his former station in life. Touro, who had lived comfortably before the war, arrived as a refugee in New York City before migrating to Jamaica, where his health suffered and he died impoverished in 1783.
While Aaron Lopez’s finances suffered due to the side he took, the Lopez family fared far better than Touro and other Loyalists forced to flee their homes. After moving to Taunton, Massachusetts in early 1776, Lopez began to rebuild his empire by supplying clothing and provisions to the Continental Army and investing in New England privateers. Still, the family continued to struggle financially, as the cash-strapped Patriots rarely paid in full or on time. Many others in the Jewish community fled to safe harbors elsewhere in other colonies, with Loyalists like Isaac Touro fleeing to New York City or Jamaica and Patriots retiring to smaller towns in the New England countryside. While most of the former never returned to Newport, the latter began to trickle back into the city soon after the end of the British evacuation in 1779. The Lopezes delayed its return through 1780 and 1781 before finally setting forth for Newport in the spring of 1782. Unfortunately, Aaron perished on the journey before reaching Newport.